WAN Optimization for Terrestrial Links Boosting universal high speed broadband services roll-out and extending the life of copper based networks January 2015 Author Thierry Masson Customer White paper
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Table of Contents 1. Introduction 2. Bandwidth Challenges - Keeping pace with rising demand 2.1. The Ubiquity of Cloud Computing 2.2. National Broadband Targets 3. Upgrading Access - What are the Options? 4. OneAccess OnePLUS 4.1. Visibility and Control 4.2. WAN Optimization 5. Performance Boost Validation 6. OneAccess OnePLUS routers 7. Summary 3
1. Introduction The case for universal high-speed Internet access is undeniable with all the key metrics showing rising demand for fast and ultra-fast connections by consumers and businesses in all parts of the world. In addition, Governments, including the US, Canada and the EU member states have all recognized the importance of extending broadband access to their citizens as a fundamental growth objective, putting short term availability and performance targets in place that are designed to underpin the long term success of their economies. Set against this market backdrop the challenge for the major carriers and communications service providers is to make high-speed Internet access not just available and affordable but capable of supporting the latest Cloud and multi-media applications for all their customers, while delivering maximum ROI for their investors and stakeholders. While advances in fixed and mobile network technologies and IP transmission protocols have given CSPs a wide range of new options to increase broadband performance and extend their services, the business case for the required investment can often be hard to justify, particularly in remote, hard to access areas with low density populations. This paper discusses the critical market drivers that are accelerating the widespread adoption of high-speed Internet access by businesses of all types. It focuses on the advantages of using Visibility, Control and WAN Optimization as a way of delivering improved application performance using existing copper infrastructure investments and helping operators meet their targets as well as achieve increased ARPU and improve customer retention rate. Finally the paper provides an overview of the OneAccess range of integrated router + WAN optimization carrier-class products that have been market-proven and tested in close collaboration with major operators and service providers in EMEA, APAC and North America. 4
2. Bandwidth Challenges - Keeping Pace with Rising Demand 2.1 Ubiquity of Cloud Computing It has been estimated that businesses can save between 10-20% 1 of the annual IT budget by transferring some or all of their infrastructure and business applications from in-house data centers to the Cloud. By moving more of their IT infrastructure costs from Capex to Opex and being able to scale resources in line with market fluctuations, business are better positioned to improve customer services, roll-out of new products and ultimately make themselves more competitive and successful. Improving end-user productivity employees rely on core applications to perform their business critical tasks, and when these applications are slow or unavailable, productivity inevitably declines.» While businesses are making the transition to a Cloud-based IT infrastructure as rapidly as possible, the extent and pace at which this can occur is determined as much by the capacity and performance of their WAN as by the operational and financial implications for the business.» However, as more and more applications and data storage requirements are shared in the Cloud, the more pressure is placed on the WAN and the operators central office infrastructure. Today s high-bandwidth consuming business applications and tech-savvy users need (and demand) reliable high-speed connections that deliver LAN-like performance at all times. Delays and interruptions to internal or customer communications are not just simply frustrating but can have a real and measurable impact on productivity and ultimately revenues, that can result in a damaging impact on the business. This means that in highly competitive markets operators need to become more agile and able to distinguish themselves by offering customers a range of flexible and extensible service bundles that meet the needs of all businesses and Cloud deployments, mitigating the risk of churn and the associated impact on their own revenues. While this may sound obvious, in reality operators are faced with a complex list of technical, commercial, demographic and geo-political factors to consider when planning the infrastructure investment needed to deliver scalable and affordable Cloud and WAN access services. 1 Making the Business Case for the Cloud. KPMG 2014 5
2.2 National Broadband Targets One major factor operators need to consider is the national connectivity targets that are now in place in most areas. Universal broadband access has been widely accepted as being a critically important factor in ensuring strong economic growth by all developed and developing countries across the globe. Backed by independent research that shows a direct correlation between the increase in broadband access and increases in national GDP, around 134 Governments and regulatory bodies around the globe have already published detailed national broadband development plans designed to provide high-speed broadband access for their populations by the end of this decade. The European Commission s Digital Agenda has set a number of targets for access and take-up of higher speed broadband. These include everyone having access to at least 30Mbps fast broadband and 50% take-up of 100Mbps ultrafast broadband by 2020 Figure 1: Average available bandwidth during peak times in European countries (Source: Quality of Broadband Services in the EU - Report March 2012) The US Government has set similar goals under its National Broadband Plan Connecting America - which specifies that at least 100 million subscribers should have access to minimum upload speeds of 100Mbps and download speeds of 50Mbps by 2020 and that every American community has affordable access to at least a 1 gigabit per second broadband service to anchor institutions such as schools, hospitals and government buildings. While the picture varies region by region (and within regions) most countries are falling behind in achieving these targets particularly in the more rural, inaccessible areas. Part of the reason for the slow progress towards the various coverage and performance targets according to a Broadband Commission Report The State of Broadband 2014 - has been the failure of governments to convince operators to invest in extending national infrastructure projects at a time when the industry is going through significant changes and is facing increasing competition from new market entrants, as well as keeping abreast of the rapidly changing technology landscape. While governments and operators are committed to delivering robust, high-capacity, high-speed networks that can support triple-play (data, video streaming and telephony) services, up until now this has essentially narrowed the operators deployment options to an expensive fiber-based solution in most parts of the world. 6
The European Commission estimates that between 38 billion and 58 billion of investment would be needed to achieve the 30 Mbps coverage target for all by 2020 and between 181 billion and 268 billion to provide sufficient coverage so that 50% of the population has access to 100 Mbps services. Reducing risk/increasing Investment Protection companies introducing new technologies such as Cloud must ensure they can operate well within the existing infrastructure, even in the bandwidth-challenged branch offices.» In 2013 the European Commission allocated a budget of 9.2 billion for improving the broadband network across the EU but this investment has since been revised down to nearer 1 billion. Clearly this is not enough to cover all of the costs involved with the remainder needing to be found through hard-to-obtain private sector funding. Set against this complex background of financial, regulatory and technical considerations it is not surprising that many of the major operators are exercising caution before ploughing billions of Euros and Dollars into new broadband infrastructure projects when there are still question marks hanging over their commercial viability, particularly in the more remote rural areas. For the CLECs and Cloud service providers this inevitably means that they too are restricted when it comes to providing all their business customers with the required high-speed services. 3. Upgrading Access - What are the Options? In an ideal world with unlimited money no object resources everyone would be provided with a robust, fiber-to-the-premises, FTTP, connection capable of handling the latest high-bandwidth consuming, video streaming and voice requirements of any business. However in the real-world, for the reasons already identified (cost, complexity and delays), this is never going to happen. Taking this as read, operators need to find workable alternative solutions if they are going to fully exploit the huge potential revenue opportunity that business uptake of Cloud services represents as well as meet their national targets. Essentially the problem can be broken down into two main questions how to provide customers with a reliable, scalable and affordable high-speed broadband service with minimal new investment? And how to extend the service to 99.9% of the population? Accelerating Application Deployments Market and competitive pressures demand ever shorter application development cycles.» With new, advanced IP transmission protocols such as VDSL2 now available, operators are able to offer some customers an enhanced performance service using their existing connections by simply upgrading the router and making small investments at street cabinet level and in the central office, to deliver speeds of between 4-100Mbps depending on the distance to the hub. But neither VDSL with vectoring and bonding or the recent G.Fast chipsets can deliver high bandwidth on copper lines longer than a few hundred meters, leaving almost 40% of the European market still behind the EU target when using existing infrastructure; reducing this high percentage is the fundamental challenge underpinning the Digital Agenda, Connecting America and comparable Asian broadband development programs. 7
Fiber being too expensive to deploy, today s only realistic technology capable of delivering the required performance for the 40% of the EU businesses that remain outside the 1Km limit of VDSL is by deploying router technology that incorporates network visibility, control and WAN Optimization. While the access link technology is a critical factor that determines the upload/download speeds of the connection, how the different business applications actually perform and the quality of the user experience are the products of numerous different factors that can be sometimes hard to control by the service provider. Clearly the operator is responsible for maintaining the access link, as far as the network edge, and the provisioning of the CPE, but how the resource is allocated and managed across the end-user s network is naturally down to individual customers and their business priorities. Delivering application visibility information to the end-customer is an essential service for companies struggling to manage the increasingly business critical applications needed to support their core operations. In a complex, large-scale business environment balancing the requirements and priorities of the various user groups is a major responsibility that needs advanced technical knowledge and skills to ensure optimum application performance and avoid unintentionally creating traffic bottlenecks in the system. This can often result in finger-pointing meetings and blame-transfer among the different stakeholders. Network visibility provides a detailed understanding of the network infrastructure and reduces the reliance on siloed tools, and the biased views of individuals responsible for different areas, to resolve any issues in an acceptable time frame. The solution is a unified application management system monitoring the health of the network and applications, including from a user perspective, and application control policing combined with WAN Optimization technologies. Application Performance Management and WAN Optimization solutions ensure improved services and user satisfaction helping to increase ARPU and customer retention.» Maximizing application performance Improving application performance and availability can protect revenue and improve customer satisfaction.» 8
4. OneAccess OnePLUS Good decisions are only as good as the information available to the decision-maker. OneAccess OnePLUS solution includes Application Performance Management functionality (APM) to provide greater visibility and control over what is happening in the network at any moment in time based on specific business priorities and the available resources. Using this intelligence the IT manager as well as the network and datacenter teams are able to see how the critical and non-critical applications are behaving in real time providing the information required to setup the right QoS policies, remove the bottlenecks and fine-tune the system in line with the business priorities. This includes eliminating redundant traffic transfer across the WAN. 4.1 Visibility and Control A recurrent problem for network managers is controlling Internet recreational usage, particularly for accessing Over-The-Top (OTT) services such as social media platforms, including Facebook and YouTube, which involve downloading high resolution/high bandwidth consuming images that can make the network unresponsive or unavailable to legitimate users. Application policies that differentiate critical from non-critical applications, Public Cloud from Private Cloud web browsing also guarantee them bandwidth and availability. Visibility and control is provided via an intuitive graphical dashboard that combines and aggregates data from distributed embedded network tools such as OneAccess NetAPM and NetControl enabled routers and appliances. NetAPM monitors traffic to report on the performance of CSP applications including those based in the Cloud. OneAPM is OneAccess powerful, multi-tenant, monitoring and reporting service that provides IT managers with detailed visibility and control of the corporate WAN. Extensive dashboards and graphs give a detailed understanding of network traffic, from the server in the datacenter, across the WAN and to the branch office, including from the end-user perspective. OneAPM provides granular analysis of network resource consumption against a range of SLAs and parameters with precise usage statistics for each application as an overall percentage of the available bandwidth as well as the volume of data and the transmission frequency. Standard reports also show comparison figures for usage of bandwidth at the different branch office locations, per application with historic data to trend the growth (or decrease) in network traffic generated by individual applications over time. This detailed information makes for informed decision-making and ensures better prioritization of bandwidth for business critical applications. OneAPM also provides statistical evidence of OnePLUS efficiency supporting stricter application SLAs thanks to automated customized report generation on a per customer basis, providing an opportunity to plan for new applications or branch office deployments. 9
Figure 2 Proposed as a Service located in OneAccess Cloud, the service provider cloud or business data center and accessed via an intuitive Web interface, OneAPM provides CSPs with a platform to upsell a Premium QoS-based service on top of their standard managed service. Allowing a pay per use business model, OneAPM as-a-service allows the CSPs to increase ARPU by rapidly launching a premium service without incurring the usual software implementation CAPEX and OPEX costs. OneAPM s multi-tenant feature offers service providers the ability to manage multiple client WAN environments via a single OneAPM service. This provides an essential network intelligence platform from which to deliver a range of value added services to their customers. Each client may be given its own login access to visualize its network while the CSP can manage, add and remove clients, each of them being a unique OneAPM instance to maintain complete separation and ensure data and resource confidentiality. NetControl enables IT managers to prioritize bandwidth allocation for business-critical application traffic and, conversely, block or restrict non-essential traffic, including access to social media sites. With NetControl, CSPs can isolate critical applications from OTT competition and protect them from being starved of bandwidth by non-critical applications. Combining User Fairness with application QoS, NetControl balances available bandwidth between users, preventing one user penalizing the rest of their colleagues. Both NetAPM and NetControl use a high-speed, deep-packet-inspection engine for application recognition, analyzing traffic based on protocols running on top of TCP, UDP and HTTP to distinguish between different applications without compromising throughput performance. 10
Figure 3 4.2 Wan Optimization The combination of high network visibility and application control allows WAN Optimization functionality to be implemented as an additional tool to improve the user experience without incurring more infrastructure investment. One of the major causes of network delay is the total amount of traffic traversing the LAN/WAN, which is, if even partially, redundant, consuming significant proportions of the finite bandwidth. A common example is when the same large documents pass between different users in the organization several times during the course of the editing process. When this happens, especially at peak usage times, it can have a serious knock-on effect creating delays for all other users of the network. WAN Optimization increases the capacity of the WAN by compressing and eliminating redundant traffic. Using Data Redundancy Elimination (DRE) techniques reduces the traffic volume when files are exchanged over the WAN multiple times, typical of business environments where documents are shared and modified by multiple people and teams. DRE ensures that only file updates and modifications are transmitted during the second and subsequent transmissions, resulting in up to a 90% reduction in the volume of traffic generated during a given transaction/file-share scenario. DRE is an efficient technology to complement application specific WAN Optimization methods such as Microsoft BranchCache. Deflate is another WAN optimization tool that additionally compresses all traffic data using a variety of shortcuts and byte reduction techniques to further minimize bandwidth consumption without impacting the application. 11
5. Performance Boost Validation Clearly the efficiency of any service investment must be proven to be effective and IT Managers can expect to have to cost justify their choices through detailed monthly management reports providing quantifiable evidence of the resultant performance enhancements. OneAccess WAN Optimization tools have undergone rigorous performance tests to quantify and validate the performance metrics under controlled laboratory conditions based on the Cisco WAFS benchmarking tools. The tests were carried out using a simulated CSP network environment with a 2Mbps WAN connection, a OneAccess WXD550 WAN optimization appliance in the central site and a ONE1520 Router with NetBooster WAN Optimization at the remote site. A variety of automated test scenarios were used with the benchmark tool executing a range of scripted operations transferring compressible standard Microsoft Office Word, Excel and PowerPoint files as well as large non-compressible executable files such as Java and Microsoft Office updates, recording response times with and without WAN optimization deployed. The tests show significant improvements when WAN optimization was activated. Figure 4 shows the transfer times with WAN optimization switched off and are compared with a first and second pass with WAN optimization on. In each case the test revealed the immediate benefit of Deflate with a marked decrease in the transfer time on the first pass and then up to 90% improvement in the second pass due to the effect of DRE. Elapsed Time in seconds 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 100K.doc 500K.doc 2M.doc 100K.xls 500K.xls 2M.xls 100K.ppt 500K.ppt 2M.ppt 50K.doc 200K.doc 1M.doc 50K.xls 200K.xls 1M.xls 50K.ppt 200K.ppt 1M.ppt Figure 4 No WAN Optimization WAN Optimized, first Pass WAN Optimized, second Pass Standard WAN Deflate Deflate + DRE 12
Figure 5 and Figure 6 show the results of tests on traffic occurring regularly when updating Windows or Java; i.e. large uncompressible files. In this example the time taken to transfer a 64MB file is reduced from a 30 to a 5 minute operation. 140 Elapsed Time in seconds Elapsed Time in seconds 3000 120 2500 100 2000 80 1500 60 40 1000 20 500 0 OneAccessDocs.pdf (7.8M) Figure 5 jre-7u51-windows-i586.exe (28M) 0 Figure 6 Office-2013-sp-1-x86-en-us.exe (644M) 6. OneAccess OnePLUS Routers OneAccess branch-office and mid-range routers are specifically designed for the operator and service provider sectors. Supporting the full range of terrestrial and wireless broadband access technologies as well as the latest performance enhancement software tools, the OneAccess family of routers provides an integrated, one-box solution for all high-speed broadband applications. All OneAccess mid-range routers and appliances can be shipped with OnePLUS software performance enhancement tools or upgraded in the field by enabling OnePLUS Visibility and Control functions as well as WAN Optimization on the box, providing ILECs and CLECs with the ability to provision innovative, extensible service bundles, backed by SLA and QoS guarantees, to a broad range of customers. OneAccess provides a tightly integrated solution that ensures end-users derive maximum performance from their IT investments and enable service providers to extend the life of their infrastructure and connectivity platforms. By combining NetAPM and NetControl software on the CPE or dedicated appliance with a multi-tenant, OneAPM monitoring and reporting server at the data center or operator central office, OnePlus ensures the delivery of high-performance, end-to-end broadband services. 13
7. Summary In a context where governments have identified the direct relationship between broadband performance and GDP, increasing the performance for the businesses in the difficult reach zone (40% of EU) provides operators with an opportunity to grow their customer base and increase ARPU. There is a clear and growing market demand for scalable, reliable high-speed broadband services as more businesses recognize the cost and efficiency benefits offered by moving to a Cloud-based, XaaS IT infrastructure. Governments across the globe have acknowledged the importance of establishing a universal high-speed broadband infrastructure in terms of the impact on economic growth and have set operators high performance and access targets to be achieved by the end of the decade. While some progress towards achieving these targets has been made through infrastructure investment in urban areas, the challenge for operators and service providers is to find ways to extend high-speed access to all businesses in their geographic territories; where fiber is not a realistic option and new technologies such as VDSL2 are only capable of boosting broadband performance to a few hundred meters. For businesses outside this range, only combining application visibility and control with WAN Optimization can offer CSPs an economically viable, high-speed broadband service platform in these traditionally underserved areas. OneAccess mid-range routers support all the latest xdsl and mobile access protocols and OnePLUS can be provisioned across the WAN for application performance management and data compression technologies to improve the user experience and maximize performance for business-critical applications. This unique combination of access options and WAN optimization functionality provides a scalable, high-speed services platform that can address the 40% of businesses outside the 1km copper range. By extending the life and performance of the existing copper infrastructure, OnePLUS offers a viable solution to reach the ambitious goals of the European Digital Agenda and Connecting America programs among others, without incurring the expense and delays inherent in the rollout of a fiber-based infrastructure. 14
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ABOUT us OneAccess designs, develops and markets innovative platforms for the profitable delivery of CPE-based managed network services for communication service providers (CSPs). Its multi-service access routers and Carrier Ethernet devices are designed to ensure service continuity and a high quality of experience for managed broadband and wireless data and voice services targeted at enterprise customers. OneAccess service-delivery platforms align with the current and future deployment and operating models of service providers by optimizing the delivery of managed Cloud services and migration to SDN architectures. OneAccess CPE platforms are used by more than 110 communication service providers internationally, including some of the world s largest telecommunications companies. With a global presence that includes North America, Europe and Asia, OneAccess, a private company, was incorporated in 2001. Smart Enterprise Access Solutions for Service Providers For more information visit www.oneaccess-net.com OneAccess, Pentagone Plaza, 381 Avenue du Général de Gaulle, 92140 Clamart, France Phone: +33 (0)1.41.87.70.00 Fax: +33 (0)1.41.87.74.00 marketing@oneaccess-net.com